accidentally deleted the wrong dynamic volume

[jamiecockrill]

Ok,

Brief history, I started off with a 60 GB Hard disk, 10GB for a pagefile (which seems excessive) and the remaining 50 GB for storage.

So I was doing stuff with disk management and accidentally deleted the wrong dynamic volume by mistake. It was originally a partitioned basic disk, which I converted to dynamic. I then deleted the small partition and extended the other volume to use its space.

I then decided that I didn't really want to do that and since disk manager was showing the two as seperate partitions, with a volume extended over both of them, I thought it'd just delete the one. But oh no. The whole hard drive went down, which is pretty distressing.

I found an article on the MS Knowledge base, giving instructions on how to recover dynamic volumes, but unfortunately, following the instructions has only given me 1 partition back again and it's the wrong size. It's given me the pagefile partition, but made it 50GB big for some odd reason.

Anyone out there have any ideas?

[jamiecockrill]

in fact, it seems that the pagefile partition has taken the whole disk, according to disk management

edit:

what i've had to do is recreate a partition and go hunting for the backup copy of the MBR using a util called dskprobe. however since I made one big volume (since the thing I deleted took up the whole disk) perhaps I was supposed to make two smaller ones. So then i might have to delete the big partition and make two smaller ones again and hope that the backups are out there somewhere!

[arthurleung]

You should have use some programs like R-studio NTFS to retrieve the file first, then try to repair the partition.

I once had that problem too. Dynamic disk is just so s*it I use purely basic disk.

[jamiecockrill]

managed to fix it in the end. I used Disk Manager to reinitiate (without formatting) the drive and then GetDataBack for NTFS went and managed to find everything (phew).

bit scary that! think i might convert them back again.

[8bit]

I may be missing something but in my experience there's no reason to use dynamic disks in a workstation/desktop machine. Besides spanned volumes the only benefit they give is the ability to use software RAID and that's disabled in non Server versions of windows.

Also bear in mind if you are thinking about a dual-boot setup with Linux, the Linux won't be able to go on (or indeed, even access) a dynamic disk. Best avoided IMHO.